WordStream will only use your AdWords credentials to analyze your account and we will never share your Google AdWords data for any reason (see our Privacy Policy). We will not retain your credentials. By running this report you agree to our key terms and conditions.

I love WordStream's AdWords grader. Some of my best and sharpest customers use WordStream's management software and report outstanding results. When you're able to squeeze more juice out of Google AdWords with less time, it frees you to work on even more profitable, bigger-picture stuff. Highly recommended.

I've tried other PPC services but WordStream is the best. Their entire services team is Google certified. They delivered exactly what they promised. I am consistantly seeing an increase in quality traffic and a decrease in my cost per click.

Brian M. Holtzman | Eco Tec Insulation, Inc.

The quality of traffic has increased dramatically since I began using WordStream, and the relevancy of the clicks has nearly doubled in less than 30 days.

Do you have a sneaking suspicion that your AdWords campaigns could be doing better?

Need to justify greater investment in PPC to your management?

Just curious if all your hard work in PPC has paid off?

Want to show off to your coworkers what a PPC rock star you are?

Any and all of these are great reasons to use the AdWords Performance Grader Plus to get a free, instant report on your AdWords account and see how your PPC metrics stack up against best practices.

Need one more great reason to use the AdWords Performance Grader Plus? It's an award-winning tool that was recognized in the 2012 Massachusetts Innovation & Technology (MITX) Innovation Awards for Best Customer Engagement Driver.

WordStream's Google AdWords Performance Grader Plus is a free AdWords tool to help AdWords advertisers better understand how well their campaigns are performing compared to PPC best practices. The AdWords Performance Grader Plus uses a proprietary grading algorithm based on more than 60 different factors, including ad spend data, Quality Score, ranking, impressions and other variables.

Your AdWords Performance Grader Plus report includes an overall grade as well as individual grades in ten key areas of pay-per-click management:

Wasted Spend - Are you making proper use of negative keywords? Or are you wasting hundreds, even thousands of dollars per month on irrelevant keywords that never convert?

In 2011, we created the AdWords Performance Grader to help advertisers audit and analyze their Google AdWords accounts. We recently passed a pretty big milestone: The AdWords Performance Grader has been used to audit AdWords accounts representing over $3 billion in collective advertising spend. That's an incredible amount of insight and analysis that we've offered to advertisers around the world, all for free.
Now, we've taken all that rich data and used it to improve the Grader. The newly relaunched AdWords Grader Plus includes new features and functionality that make it even more valuable to busy marketers and small businesses. The improvements include:

Performance Tracker: automatically track and analyze your account every 30 days, so you can see how your overall performance and key metrics are trending over time. For example, advertisers can use Performance Tracker to easily monitor and act on changes in Quality Score ? something Google just doesn't offer.

New and Improved Benchmarks: We've revisited our competitive benchmarks for PPC, so all of the KPIs in your performance report (including Quality Score, click-through rate, account activity, and wasted spend) are more current based on the thousands of accounts we've analyzed.

Google AdWords uses a paid search advertising model, in which users bid on the keywords they want to have trigger their sponsored ads. Your AdWords ads are then displayed alongside search results on Google when someone uses one of your keywords in their search query.

The prevalence of your advertisements appearing depends on which keywords and match types you select. WordStream offers a number of free keyword tools that can assist in your PPC keyword research, as well as informative, free white papers on topics such as AdWords match types.

Quality Score - Google's rating of the quality and relevance of your keywords and PPC campaigns.

Relevance & Quality Score also play a role in the Google Display Network where AdSense technologies are used to figure out what ads to show on what pages through-out the Google display networks

Can I Do Pay Per Click Advertising By Myself?

Anyone with a website and credit card can do pay per click advertising on Google AdWords. However, we've found that most advertisers are not well-informed on how to create an effective advertising campaign to drive paid clicks to real business leads. That's why we created the AdWords Performance Grader - a free tool that breaks down the technical aspects of PPC so you know which parts of your AdWords account to improve.

Google's AdWords Quality Score is a grading system that judges your ads and gives you a "score." Having a good AdWords Quality Score is essential to a successful AdWords campaign.

Google's quality rating has a powerful influence over the cost-effectiveness of your paid search campaigns, making it essential to have a good Quality Score in AdWords. Having a high Quality Score is a tremendous benefit to your AdWords campaign, as it provides you with:

Lower costs - Google rewards advertisers with high Quality Scores by lowering their cost per click (CPC), which can subsequently lower your cost per conversion.

More exposure - When you have high Quality Scores, your ads will display more often and in better positions. You can get more exposure, more clicks, and more conversions without having to raise your bids.

Having a high Quality Score is key, but it can often be difficult to manage the varying factors that contribute to Quality Score single handedly. WordStream offers easy-to-use and expertly engineered PPC management software that is specifically designed to improve your Google AdWords Quality Score.

Click-through rate (CTR) measures the percentage of clicks advertisers receive on their ads per the number of impressions. "Impressions" refers to how often your ad is viewed-if your ad has a lot of impressions but no clicks, you will have a low CTR, which generally reduces the effectiveness of your campaigns.

Click-through rate is important because it affects your Quality Score, making a high CTR an essential component of a profitable AdWords campaign.

Negative keywords serve as essential building blocks in establishing a successful keyword list.

Adding a negative keyword to your AdWords ad group or campaign ensures that your ad will not appear for search queries containing that term. Using negative keywords in your Google AdWords campaign is beneficial because they:

Google AdWords and other search marketing platforms offer pricing discounts for ads that have high relevance, providing searchers with the ads they want to find. Google AdWords gives high Quality Scores to advertisers with high AdWords click-through rates. In sum:

Filter Out Unwanted Ads - Creating a negative keyword ensures that your ad doesn't show for that particular term.

Allow You to Reach the Most Appropriate Audience - By ensuring that only relevant queries trigger your ad, you are more likely to reach an audience that is likely to convert.

Finding negative keywords and adding them to your account can be a difficult and tedious process. Digging through AdWords search query reports is a slow, redundant process, and AdWords limits how much query data is visible to advertisers.

WordStream offers an innovative negative keyword tool that makes finding negative keywords easy. It's also a proactive method of negative keyword discovery, enabling you to weed irrelevant keywords out of your campaigns before they can cost you a cent.

Having a well-crafted landing page is a big component of a good Google AdWords Quality Score. From the moment a prospective customer reaches your landing page, everything should be tailored to helping the customer find what they are searching for and assist them towards a conversion.

A successful landing page requires a number of different elements:

Keyword Segmentation - Different types of keywords should take visitors to different landing pages with their own customized offers.

Navigability - Users should be able to easily find what they are looking for and move around your site.

Compelling Offer - If your ad references special products, have those products be front and center on the landing page. You should give visitors a reason to stay.

The better the landing page, the more conversions you are likely to achieve. Expertly designed landing pages have a powerful impact on both SEO and PPC marketing campaigns.

Organic Search Benefits: Keyword-relevant content results in higher rankings in the SERPs for the keywords you're targeting, bringing more visibility and more traffic.

Pay-Per-Click Benefits: Keyword-specific AdWords landing pages are much more likely to earn strong Quality Scores and high conversion rates, as the landing pages will be more aligned with the searcher's intent.

While a better optimized landing page will help increase conversion rates, depending on what you are trying to persuade visitors to do, what constitutes a "good" conversion rate will vary.

A "good" conversion rate depends on what the desired conversion is. Conversion rates will tend to be higher if visitors are asked to sign up with a simple form to receive something free. If visitors have to fill out a lengthy survey or provide credit card information, conversion rates will be lower. While conversions can range from 0-50%, 2% is quite common.

With Google conducting nearly 70% of all online searches (more than Yahoo and Bing combined), success with Google AdWords can drive an enormous amount of traffic to your business.

Google AdWords has revolutionized the online advertising landscape, encouraging advertisers to create relevant ads that cater to the searcher's needs. The innovative quality requirements that make Google AdWords so unique and powerful can also make it tricky for advertisers to maximize their ROI, especially as new businesses struggle to juggle the various components that make up AdWords.

The AdWords Performance Grader provides clarity and understanding to the difficult and confusing elements of Google AdWords Management. Because AdWords is so complex, it can often be difficult to determine where you are losing money in your campaign.

The AdWords Performance Grader gives you a fast, free, and easy-to-understand audit of your AdWords campaign, showing where and how to improve your PPC campaign in order to maximize profits.

The AdWords Performance Grader can be used in numerous ways:

New to Online Marketing? Learn where to focus your efforts as you begin in Google AdWords, ensuring a profitable and efficient campaign.

Are You an Experienced AdWords Advertiser? The AdWords Performance Grader provides a thorough and comprehensive report on your Google AdWords campaigns, bringing your attention to where you can improve results and save money.

Does an Agency Manage Your Google AdWords Account? Use the Performance Grader as a free auditing tool to see how well your agency is working for you.

Are You an Agency that Manages Google AdWords Accounts for Clients? Use the AdWords Performance Grader to explain and illustrate your work to clients in a format that can be easily understood.

Try out our free AdWords Performance Grader, and let us unlock the secret of AdWords for you.

Looking to improve your AdWords score? We've recently interviewed the top scoring users of the Performance Grader and have asked them to share their AdWords secrets and strategies, explaining how they've gotten their Google AdWords campaigns into top-notch condition.

Marko Kvesic of Zagreb, Croatia, holds a master's degree in traffic science, and explains that he often alters his campaign strategy depending on a client's goals—some may be dedicated to building a solid long-term AdWords campaign, while others might be more focused on an immediate increase in traffic. Marko explains that different needs require different organization.

Here are some of the key PPC techniques Marko suggests in building a successful AdWords campaign:

I create ad groups of related keywords with exact mach only keywords, and ad groups with broad and modified broad keywords.

I bid based on my client budget and goals (if the goal is traffic on the site I use CPC, if it is conversion I use CPA, if it is branding I use CPM bidding).

I focus on increasing Quality Score so I pay less for the click.

Location extension is a must.

Marko also notes the importance of continuously working to improve campaign results through testing and optimization.

His advice to struggling AdWords managers?

"My advice is always be relevant, create relevant campaigns and give the user the answer to his query as precisely as you can."

To read the full article, with Marko's complete list of tips and in-depth recommendations, check out the full interview on our blog.

Also consider the advice of Stefan van Vliet, co-owner of Dutch agency Compass Online Marketing, who completed the second interview in our second series of ongoing interviews with those who received high scores with the Google AdWords Performance Grader.

In our full interview with Stefan, he explains some of the AdWords errors he made early on when first beginning his campaigns:

"I chose to set the budget to virtually limitless and tried to optimize our campaign while running, but just couldn't keep up (and honestly didn't know what I was doing). So only 1 week and almost 10k in losses later I pulled the plug. So for an extensive lesson in AdWords management: always test before you allocate serious budgets."

Stefan explains his company's successful AdWords strategy:

Get sufficient data by bidding high and getting in spot #2-3 (above organic results).

The AdWords Grader has been applauded by various media outlets, recommending it as a fantastic tool that can help improve your AdWords campaign. See what trusted sources have to say about the AdWords Grader:

"The company has refined the tool based on the wealth of past audit history to give advertisers performance benchmarks within their own industries." - Ginny Marvin of Search Engine Land (Read the full WordStream review)

"What excites me the most [about the AdWords Grader] is the 'PPC Best Practices' scorecard which indicates whether or not the account is opted into such aspects as conversion tracking, geo-targeting (essential for small and medium businesses) and usage of ad-extensions like site-links and business phone numbers." - Graeme Lipshitz of Memeburn

"The [Adwords Grader] tool is efficient enough to provide insightful analysis on par with the audits one would receive from an agency or a consultant." - Navneet Kaushal of Page Traffic Buzz

"This [Adwords Grader] tool is easy to use and provides the same kind of account analysis you might get from a consultant or agency. It gives you actionable insights. What's not to like?" - Claudia Bruemmer of Top Ten Wholesale

"Do you toss and turn all night, unsure if your Google PPC campaigns are measuring up? Better take a trip over to WordStream to get a free audit through the AdWords Performance Grader." - Gavin Dunaway of Adotas

"While there are no universally determined benchmarks for good AdWords campaigns, the AdWords Performance Grader from WordStream goes a remarkably long way towards establishing standards for this." - Marshall Sponder of Web Metrics Guru

"This tool would be highly beneficial for medium and small-sized businesses." - Jitesh Pillai of Ebrandz

"We're really excited about the help this tool can offer PPC advertisers as they work on more efficiently managing their PPC campaigns and improving their ad text writing techniques. Congratulations to WordStream on a great new free PPC tool!" - Tom Demers of Boost CTR

Give it [AdWords Performance Grader] a try. (It's free — why not?) I'm willing to bet you will learn something you can use — either to improve a campaign or to reduce the amount of money you're wasting. Either way, you win. - Jeff Haden of BNet

"The areas that this new tool focuses on can have a profound effect on your account's overall performance. I would recommend you give it a try to see how you compare." - Chad Summerhill, writer of PPC Prospector blog

I'm impressed with the results... I think [the AdWords Grader] is a valuable addition to any competitive analysis of PPC. - PPC Without Pity (Read the full WordStream review)

"...the AdWords Grader tool gives a great overview of general account performance and areas of possible improvement, and is definitely worth checking out!" - Jessica Niver of PPC Hero